Trade, Commerce & Industry

David Dale

David Dale

Born the son of a grocer in Stewarton, Ayrshire, in 1739,
David Dale was to go on to become a renowned philanthropist and to
revolutionise industrial practice throughout Great Britain and the
world. After an initial apprenticeship as a weaver in the town of
Paisley, Dale started a business importing and selling homespun
linen from the continent which prospered, and before long the
fortune he made allowed him to marry into an influential family and
buy a large house in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh which had been
designed by Robert Adam. He was also appointed as the very first
agent in Glasgow for the Royal Bank of Scotland (his wife being the
bank Director's daughter). His interest in the textile trade
remained, however, and he set up a factory manufacturing Turkey-red
dye and several cotton mills in New Lanark, on the banks of the
Clyde.

The first of four mills was built in 1785 and was to
become something of a social engineering experiment. Much of his
workforce made up of children and with workers becoming scarce to
find due to all the other mills in the area, Dale turned to local
orphanages in Edinburgh and Glasgow for a supply of labour. Dale
was both a religious man and a philanthropist, and so these
children were treated very well for the time, being housed beside
the mills, looked after and well fed and even given two hours
schooling (no other factory offered this) every night after their
shift (which lasted from 6 o'clock in the morning to seven at
night). Rather than split families up, children who were too young
to work were also recruited; these children were schooled through
the day until old enough to join their brothers and sisters on the
factory floor. Dale also needed adult workers however and for this
he turned to the Highlanders who had recently been 'cleared' from
their ancestral homes in the North of the country and were flooding
south towards Glasgow in the hope of finding a new life for
themselves. Most of these workers did not speak English (only
Gaelic) and so otherwise found recruitment difficult. Again Dale
housed and educated these families, who proved one of the best
workforces in the country. By the mid-1790's over 2000 people lived
and worked in the community of New Lanark.

Tapping into the skills of these highlanders, Dale soon
established other mills in Oban, Sutherland and Perthshire,
allowing them to remain in the highlands and to retain their pride
and dignity. Dale's practices were viewed with interest by other
mill owners across the whole of Europe, Russia and even
America.

David Dale died in 1806 at his estate of Rosebank near
Cambuslang but his work was already being carried on by his
son-in-law Robert Owen, who seeing the benefits of a happy and
enlightened workforce spread Dale's working ethics overseas and
expanded the business, establishing New Harmony in Indiana in the
United States on the New Lanark pattern. Dale had proved that the
blossoming factories of the industrial revolution did not need to
be an inhumane environment for employees.